Fertility Diary: Hope Springs Eternal

Fertility Diary

My new fertility clinic looks like a spa: It is white and airy, with serene Muzak playing at a tasteful volume in the background. As Solomon, my husband, and I enter, we see a table offering coffee and cake, and in the center of the gray leather couches and tan chairs, a giant, mesmerizing fish tank, as if to remind us of the cycle of life (I guess they couldn’t keep rabbits).

Based on looks, this new Columbus Circle clinic is a step up from my previous one on the Upper East Side, where busy women in business suits lined up at 6:30 a.m. outside the 10th-floor office door for their blood tests before hurrying off to their law firms or Wall Street offices. We had been at that clinic for the last five months doing the turkey-baster procedure, which is what I like to call intrauterine insemination: they injected concentrated sperm via catheter into my uterus, which is meant to facilitate fertilization. It is as sexy as it sounds, and the clinic has the sperm “collection rooms” to prove it.

I never thought I would have to take the next step, in vitro fertilization. (Actually, before I started all this, I had assumed the turkey baster procedure was IVF.) But, as I am just beginning to learn, those three simple letters open a door to a whole new world, where they extract a woman’s eggs and fertilize them with sperm, then transfer embryos back into the uterus. (Who knew this was the “test tube babies” I heard about growing up?)

But I had given the more “natural” way a try, and it wasn’t working. IVF was the next step. We couldn’t afford the $20,000 for one cycle of IVF at the East Side clinic. Besides, I was petrified thinking about flooding my body with hormones; even the medications for the intrauterine insemination had made me sick. I didn’t want to get bloated and fat and moody and slightly homicidal.

That was why we moved to New Hope Fertility Clinic, which does a “mini-IVF” protocol, using a fraction of the medication to retrieve fewer — but what it calls more promising — eggs.

“Every time a patient goes through conventional IVF, the number of eggs designated as waste is about 90 percent,” New Hope’s founder and director, Dr. John Zhang, recently told Time magazine in the article “Frontiers of Fertility.” Because it focuses on fewer eggs, one round of mini-IVF costs half to a quarter of the price of conventional in vitro fertilization.

At our exit interview, my East Side doctor criticized mini-IVF, saying, “You’re just going to end up spending the same amount of money over a longer period of time.” I hoped he was wrong. I so desperately want to have a baby, but I wasn’t willing to put my body — and, to a lesser extent, my pocketbook — through the conventional IVF.

Besides, I couldn’t help but feel that I was at a factory on the East Side, just one cog in the wheel that would help boost its success rates, which all fertility clinics have to report to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Two friends at New Hope (not yet pregnant) told me that the clinic focused on the individual, accepting patients other clinics wouldn’t because they were afraid of ruining their American Society for Reproductive Medicine statistics. (As with college rankings, many clinics manipulate numbers to be attractive to future clients.)

In 2009 Dr. Zhang got a 49-year-old woman pregnant with her own eggs.

By comparison, I am young – only 42 – and hopeful.

My husband, as always, is more skeptical. “Maybe they should call it ‘Last Hope,’ ” he joked, his marketing background rearing up. He is not swayed by the spa atmosphere and the free danish. Oh, he’s confident we will have a child, he just likes to take a more wait-and-see approach, wanting hard evidence before he gets too excited. “Cautious optimism,” he calls it. I am more like that Billy Joel song “Summer, Highland Falls”: capable of only sadness or euphoria.

I can’t help it. I am excited. This is the place, I can feel it. Our baby will be conceived here.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more